The Secret of Santa Vittoria

by Robert Crichton

  The people were pleased with their new church. “You could hardly tell it was stretched,” they said.

  They were so pleased with the results that they paid the church stretcher exactly half of what they had said they would pay him, which was considerably more than they had planned to pay, and to this day it remains a mystery in Scarafaggio as to how the newer, bigger church with the added pew holds exactly the same number of souls as the old one.

  In the first week in September that year Bombolini called a meeting of all the people in the Piazza of the People on a Sunday, and he asked the people to look out over the valley at Scarafaggio.

  “They’re laughing at us over there,” he told the people. This was astonishing news. “For two hundred years they have been going around, every day, laughing at us.”

  It was hard to believe. He allowed them a few minutes to study the miserableness heaped up across the valley, and then the bell in our tower rang out.

  “Do you hear that?” Captain Bombolini asked them. Everyone nodded, and then he pointed across the valley. “Well so do they.” He allowed them to think about this.

  “They get up by our bell. They go out by our bell. They go to Mass by our bell.” The people were astounded by this. It had never occurred to any of them before.

  “We pay for the bell and they use the sound. While someone here sweats to make it ring they lie in their beds and listen to it sing. They lie in their beds and they laugh.”

  If the best thing in the world is to get something for nothing it follows that the worst is to give away something and get nothing back for it.

  “It is as simple as this,” Bombolini told them. “Scarafaggio is stealing our sound.”

  The people were violent about it. Pietrosanto, for example, was all for calling out the Santa Vittoria army and marching on Scarafaggio. It became a little foolish after that, and everyone today is willing to admit it. But at the moment there seemed nothing foolish about it.

  “Take down the bell,” someone shouted, and that seemed like a very good solution. “Better no bell than to give away our sound.” There was a roar of approval.

  “Keep the bell, but cut the rope so no one can ring it,” another man shouted. That made even more sense.

  To his credit, Bombolini was able to restrain the excited people. He pointed to the new sign at the end of the piazza.

  “Remember. The three true virtues of the Italian people. Tranquillity. Calmness. Patience. Restrain yourselves. Your captain has a plan for you. The old wrong will be righted.”

  So the city was excited after that. The people, as the Master said they should be, were astounded. That Sunday night three men left Santa Vittoria with a mule and a donkey and some of the old Etruscan vases from the room in the Palace of the People that had once served as a museum, and everyone knew it had to do with the Solution. Only Fabio, to whom Bombolini had already told the solution, was unexcited.

  “If you go through with this I leave Santa Vittoria,” Fabio said. “I resign from the Grand Council. I return to Montefalcone where I belong.”

  Bombolini was hurt by this, because Fabio, in a way, is the conscience of Santa Vittoria.

  “It’s an evil thing,” Fabio said. “You know it is. It appeals to the people’s worst instincts.”

  “That’s not such a bad instinct, Fabio, to want what is yours.”

  “It’s a rotten instinct and you know it.”

  “You forget one thing, Fabio. The people are the people, yes, but they also are only human beings. They are only Christians, not Christs.”

  Fabio put on his hat to show that he was leaving.

  “You have no right to sell the Etruscan vases. They belong to the people. To all of us.”

  “No one ever looked at them, you know that. They sat in there covered with dust. You couldn’t even carry water in them.”

  “The vases,” Fabio said, with elaborate disgust, “happen to be two thousand years old.”

  “And what good is a vase if it can’t carry water?”

  The look of pain on Fabio’s face was genuine.

  “You hurt me deeply,” Bombolini said. “You make me feel like some kind of evil person.”

  “If they come back up this mountain with that thing, I go,” Fabio said, and he left.

  It was not known at the time, no one could understand Fabio’s ways then, but he wanted an excuse to leave the city other than for his own self, his own broken heart, and he had found it. If anyone should have been able to see it, it was myself; but I was young then and didn’t wish to see things like that.

  The men who had left Santa Vittoria with the donkey and the mule came back to the city early one evening a few days after they had left. The Etruscan vases were gone, but on the back of the mule was a large package wrapped in old sheets and tied around with grapevine. The people went down into the streets to see them come. They tried to touch the package, but the men pushed them away. Fabio came to see me in my room.

  “All right,” he told me. “I’m leaving. You can have her now. She is all yours.”

  I told him I didn’t know what he was talking about. In a way I didn’t, and yet in a way I knew what he meant.

  “You know what I mean,” he said. I had never seen him angry in this way before. He was cold and he seemed at once years older than before and years older than myself because he had suffered. If I had fought with Fabio then, it would have been the sort of fight that could not have stopped until one of us was dead or close to death.

  “She eats you up with her eyes,” he said. “She devours you. She falls all over you.”

  “I never asked her to.”

  “Oh, no. You lie there and lead her on, because you Americans don’t have manners as we do. You take advantage.” He was suddenly very generous toward me. “It’s all right. I would do the same thing. Do I hate you for it? I envy you. It’s nothing. I was simply born in the wrong place.”

  I was thankful that it was dark in my room and he couldn’t see my face then. I had meant nothing by the little games I played with Angela, although something seemed to take place between us when we played them.

  “Why do you think an American wouldn’t marry you?” I would say to Angela.

  “Oh, Americans don’t go for girls like me. They want rich girls.”

  “It helps. But they like pretty girls, too.”

  “Then I’m not pretty enough.”

  “Maybe not,” I would say. “Then again. Stand up there by the window and let me see you.”

  She was so simple and so sweet and of course she would stand by the window.

  “Americans want women like the Malatesta.”

  “Oh, all men want women like the Malatesta. But if you can’t get the Malatesta you have to get someone else. Someone like … someone like…” And she would turn scarlet.

  I didn’t know then that men and women didn’t talk to each other this way in Santa Vittoria unless they were going to be married, or that they didn’t talk to each other in the same room or that many of them never touched one another until the date of their wedding was announced.

  “She never sees me,” Fabio said. “She has forgotten my name. I’ll tell you what she has done.” He was close to shouting at me by then. “For two weeks she has failed to bring me my plate of beans.” He went to his own room to pack his things.

  * * *

  The men with the package unwrapped it that night and did what work they had to do so that it was ready for Sunday morning. On that morning Fabio della Romagna left the city for Montefalcone. He did not take his bicycle, because it was dangerous to be on the roads with a bike without a pass from the Germans or without a good reason. The few things he took were in a small, crude knapsack on his back. He reached the bottom of the mountain and was crossing the flat fields toward the River Road that leads to Montefalcone, when some men he knew from Santa Vittoria came running toward him.

  “Fabio,” one of them shouted at him. “Fabio, Fabio, Fabio. It’s marvelous. Look.�
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  He turned Fabio around so that he was looking back up the mountain at the city. Someone on the Fat Wall was waving what appeared to be Vittorini’s flag.

  “You see? You understand, Fabio?” the man said to him. “That means it’s ringing and we can’t hear a thing.”

  “Nothing!”

  “Not a Goddamn thing,” a third man said.

  “You should have seen them in Scarafaggio, Fabio. Their jaws hanging open. ‘What happened to the bell?’ they ask. ‘What’s the matter with the bell?’”

  “And not a sound, Fabio,” the first one said again. “The greatest moment in the history of the city of Santa Vittoria.”

  None of them understood when Fabio broke loose and began to trot and then ran to the River Road. They themselves began to trot toward Santa Vittoria to tell the people that it truly worked and to describe the silence over Scarafaggio.

  In the Piazza of the People they didn’t wait for the men from Scarafaggio before beginning to celebrate. It was clear from the first ringing of the bell that it was a success.

  One of the Pietrosantos, whose back muscles could be seen through the shirt he was wearing, was in the campanile pulling the rope. They heard the old creak as the bell began to swing, but what they heard after that was something they had never heard before. The clapper met the bronze bell and there was a low muffled sound, not the good clear bong of before. It was the sound of a bell, but just barely. The people looked at one another and they began to smile and as the muffled sound went on they began to laugh out loud and finally to hit each other on the back while tears began to run down from their eyes.

  The first of the runners came up from Old Town and down from High Town. You could hear the bell down there and up there, they reported, but only just barely. The sound ended at the town walls.

  It was recognized for what it was, an act of inspiration, even an act of genius. The members of the Grand Council lined up in the piazza to take Captain Bombolini’s hand, and soon a good part of the city was in the line. After shaking his hand they went up the steep winding stairs to the top of the bell tower itself to feel the clapper.

  Cork! A cork clapper.

  There could be no doubt about it. It was an act of inspiration, an act of genius. The Grand Council authorized some young men to go down to the Cooperative Wine Cellar and withdraw two hundred bottles of wine, and the celebration for the cork clapper began.

  This much can be put down, not as a guess but as a fact. In all of the history of Santa Vittoria, in a thousand years at least, the people had never been more united or the government in better shape or the leadership in more capable hands.

  3 VON PRUM

  ON THAT SAME NIGHT, the night of the cork clapper, Captain Sepp von Prum, of the Financial Affairs Division of the Headquarters Staff of the Fifth Panzer Brigade, with headquarters in Montefalcone, was finishing the last of his letters. Every Sunday afternoon and every Sunday evening he devoted to doing his letters. He signed the last of them, and since it was not late he decided to take them down to the Piazza Frossimbone and have them stamped as censored by Colonel Scheer, his commanding officer. He wrote a good letter. He was conscious of that, and unlike a lot of other junior officers he did not mind having the letters censored. When the colonel merely glanced at them and stamped them “censored” he was sometimes disappointed.

  He went down the narrow stone stairs of the house in which he was billeted more swiftly than he usually did and it caused him pain, since he was still recovering from wounds he had received the year before. All the men stationed with his unit in Montefalcone had been damaged in some serious fashion in North Africa or in Russia. Despite the pain, he continued to walk swiftly down the street of San Stefano into the piazza. There had been a rumor that the Americans and the English had made a landing somewhere south of Rome that morning and that the Italians not only had withdrawn from the war but were about to declare themselves in a state of war with Germany. At eight o’clock the news would come from the English in Cairo, and he wanted to be with the other officers when Colonel Scheer turned it on.

  It is a fortunate thing for us that the letters of Captain von Prum have been preserved in the archives of Santa Vittoria, which actually is nothing more than the battered old gray file cabinet that von Prum was forced to leave behind when he left Santa Vittoria.

  It is a fortunate thing that he made and preserved copies of everything he wrote, military records, entries in his diary and log, letters to his brother who was serving on the eastern front in Russia, and even letters to his fiancée, Christina Mollendorf, which were filed under the heading “Love Interest.”

  From the letters we were able to obtain a picture of the captain that might always have puzzled us here if we had not been able to have them translated and read to us. It doesn’t seem out of place to print parts of several of the letters the captain wrote that day.

  From the notes to his brother Klaus, we have been able to figure out that during an action along the Dnieper Bend several of Klaus’s soldiers broke and ran in the face of Russian tanks, although they later returned to the field of battle. Despite this, the young men were shot, as an example to the others; and the officer who had reported them, Klaus von Prum, was badly shaken by the action.

  Dear Father:

  Mother writes to ask if I am happy. It can only be German mothers who write to ask if their sons are happy at war.

  Actually I am happy. Happy to be alive, happy to still have my leg. I won’t be climbing any mountains, but each day the leg grows stronger.

  I am writing Klaus as you suggest. I too am worried about him.

  As you can see I am now in the Financial Affairs Section, the Jewish Infantry as you used to call it. I am afraid that any chance of earning a medal now rests with Klaus. Actually we have little to do with finances. We spend most of our time cataloguing the assets of the area, and I will let you to guess what for.

  You ask how it is here in Montefalcone and I answer you. Pleasant but dirty. If these people could be persuaded to keep their streets clean and their plaster from falling down, it might be called attractive and even beautiful. They seem to have an affinity for falling plaster.

  My side job is that of Cultural Relations officer and it has been no easy task. It is no simple assignment to persuade these people that we come as friends and not as conquerors.

  The money here comes from wine and I can tell you this much. Under sound German management the gross product of the region could be doubled. But they go on in their own old ways. They have a positive affinity for duplication and waste.

  If nothing else, the work improves my Italian. I even speak the dialect now, to the amazement of one and all. When next you see me I will be spikking like a proper wop.

  Respectfully, your son,

  Sepp von Prum

  Captain, Infantry

  I suppose by now you have heard of the rescue of Mussolini by the SS pilot or some such story. The fact that he wasn’t put to death is so typical of the sentimental and disorganized Eytie. How such a clown ever got in control of the government in the first place is beyond a puzzle, but then history shows that these people have an affinity for clowns.

  Darling Christina, ma petite chou:

  You ask about the Italian women.

  Do you recall last week when I described the inability of these people to plan for the future because they only live for the present?

  Well. About their women. This is one case where they are right.

  STOP. I can see that pretty face of yours flushing with anger. Let me put it in this fashion. Some of these women are beautiful. And some of them most decidedly seem to have an affinity for blond, light-skinned, blue-eyed men. But then one loses interest in them because there is always this feeling (I am sorry to be crude) that their underwear, if indeed they have any on at all, is not clean. And so one loses interest. Frankly I think their interest in us is just because we might have on clean underwear ourselves.

  Do this for me.
Put down this letter at once and go to your mirror and then look into it and know this, that little face in that glass, those clear blue eyes and those full lips and that soft white complexion belong to the kind of woman that appeals to me.

  You may cease blushing now.

  Lovingly,

  Sepp von Prum

  Klaus:

  What kind of nonsense is this you have written home? You have upset your family. Let us try to isolate one thing. You are not young Werther in love, you are an officer in the Army of the Third Reich.

  You ask what you should have done and I tell you. You do what you did. You do your duty.

  If your commanding officer says they should be shot for the best of all, they are shot. It is as simple as that. You have lost your concept of duty.

  Duty is what? Duty is one’s responsibility to an idea larger than the self. This cancer of the self! The putting of one’s conscience beyond one’s duty is the true sickness of our time.

  Look at this place. To coddle the self the people have lost the ability to perform the simplest collective actions. They cannot even keep their streets swept, Klaus.

  You say you feel “chained” by the Germanic sense of duty. You have an affinity for the overcomplex argument.

  Duty does not bind one, it frees one from personal responsibility.

  Duty liberates action. All kinds of acts become possible.

  There is only one question: Does my act help the Fatherland or not? There is nothing complex about it. Duty sticks out.

  Once you have done your duty you will eat better and sleep better and feel better, because self-doubt will have been put to death. You have always had an affinity for the morbid, and the time has come for it to cease.

  Get on with your soldiering and do your duty and take care of yourself.

  Your brother,

  Sepp

  A memorandum to a superior officer in the Cultural Affairs Section in Munich: